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It’s difficult to throw off the idea of a separation between mind and body, even though science now teaches the opposite, that the two are deeply entangled, and you can’t have one without the other. On the other hand, science is paradoxical, and at the same time, some scientists tell us we can create artificial minds in the circuits of electronic machinery. I’ve written before in these pages about why Artificial Intelligence should be called Artificial Stupidity.1 What concerns me here, however, is neither neuroscience nor cybernetics but lived experience, the subjectivity of sentience that the former is unable to explain and is lacking in the latter, and in this perspective, specifically the experience of growing old, when you become aware that mind and body have different rhythms. What normally happens is that the mind stays on track while the body ages. You begin to realise that you look older than you feel. It creeps up on you. You enter a crowded train carriage and someone offers you their seat. The people you see on a regular basis don’t seem to notice, and unless you fall ill, nor do you, but you begin to realise that your mind and your body are out of sync. You have to admit to yourself that you’re getting older.
Then memory steps in and brings your life back to you, along with the circumstances that have shaped it, some of which are private and autobiographical while others are social, cultural and historical. If, like me, you’re a teacher, you come to realise that the history you take for granted is remote from your students, and is not just about facts. It is also the domain of culture, and culture is a form of intersubjectivity disseminated through signs and symbols which are constantly changing. Central to the transmission of culture is the way the visual arts generate body images which reflect the human body back to us, both as ideal and individually, from classical Greek sculpture to the Renaissance to the rise of portraiture and beyond, to its fragme